chunkbot

Holy shit! I've been programming in JavaScript for years and never heard about the debugger statement. This looks great for really understanding the details of JavaScript's object model.

It's never ok to yell at someone.

See also: http://tent.io

Serious question: Is it so bad to live and die with some regrets? Should we live our lives according to a "regret-minimization" framework? Does regret, which most acknowledge as a negative emotion or feeling, actually serve a positive purpose in our lives?

I really enjoyed the article. I was already familiar with Mark Manson and the "pickup" scene, so imagine my surprise when I saw the http://postmasculine.com link on the front page of Hacker News. I highly recommend the book Models by Mark Manson [1] if you're a man at all interested in being more attractive to women.

[1] - http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1463750358

Just drag and drop the icon into the trash.

If I recall correctly, Four Hour Workweek doesn't say you can change the world in four hours a week. It specifically describes how a "lifestyle business" can provide for you and let you travel many days out of the year.

I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs put in 16 hours a day when Apple was still a startup. I'm not saying you should do that, but it might not be wrong to.

Sorry, but no.

There is very little spam; what's to elaborate?

Groupon is worth more than all the other entries x10-100.

"If you're considering downvoting this, wait until Tuesdays to do so :)"

I'll take my chances ;)

I'm liking the new trend of making databases "fast" by default, with "safe" configurations. People who care about safety should take the time make it so; people who want it fast, well, give it to them faster! So maybe PostgreSQL should offer faster defaults?

Facebook is doing all it can to ramp up supply; I heard that Mr. Zuckerberg made Facebook for the sole purpose of getting laid (his users, not him).

    :sex

Sex symbol, or colon sex?

Private starts with a P. Privileged does too.

Rand's philosophies are far from universal truths.

I hope they did; We tried this app, but ended up having to roll our own because of missing features. Of course, we were using it for hex display, not hex editing, so what we came up with was mostly better visualization of binary wire data (specifically, more custom data types than int and float)..

If only he had taken Groupon equity; he'd be a multi-millionaire. Does anyone know if the owner of the groupon.com domain had such an offer?

Anything tangible or intangible that is capable of being owned or controlled to produce value and that is held to have positive economic value is considered an asset. Ideas aren't special; they're assets, just like any other economic resource. However, ideas are very illiquid. To extract the value of an idea, you have to execute it, which can take months or years and is very uncertain. Liquidity makes assets worth more, so ideas take a significant price cut since they're so hard to "sell". So that's why ideas aren't worth very much...

At the bottom of the article is a great summary of Twitter's history. Overall it's an interesting article, although the writer falls back on a few too many cliches.

I'll await the blog post; I can't be the only one who's interested the know the motivations. And for the record, I agree that it's the practical results that matter (for those who would criticize an OS choice). We're doing "embarrassing" things with what amounts to an EAV/graph database built on top of MySQL (with all the vertices in-memory), but we're incredibly happy with our results.

Why does Loopt use a Microsoft stack?

It's not an article in The Economist; it's a post from one of their blogs on the site.

This isn't interesting anymore; Erlang and Prolog simply aren't related beyond the most superficial of syntactical rules. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3542891/erlang-programmin...

Plenty of languages were initially prototyped in C, but we don't consider them "based on C" because they kept braces. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3542891/erlang-programmin...

No?

It's parasites all the way down.

Facebook tracks your movement across every page with a Facebook asset? Does Google do something like this as well?

Obliged to respond, even if this is from two years ago, as a lot of our work is in Erlang... 1) is completely wrong; Erlang doesn't have anything to do with Prolog, and the syntax is actually pretty straightforward. 2) is for the most part true, though the bigger problem is finding one library that solves your problem (rather than choosing from two or more). 3) is mostly true (there are plenty of Erlang charlatans; try hiring for an Erlang position and see what manner of Erlang programmers you find). 4) is completely false; large (100K to 1M+ SLoC) Erlang codebases are manageable. 5) could be a good point, but might be said about any language; in the end, results speak for themselves. 6) might be a valid concern, but for the most part, Erlang code is behind the web layer, and some other application relays the requests to the back-end.7) is pretty much irrelevant.

At the end of the day, if you're happy with the results you're getting with Erlang (and you can get great results), who cares if the rest of the world thinks Erlang has no fashion sense? Erlang is still beautiful.